Monday, 4 June 2012

KATHRYN JOOSTEN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Kathryn Joosten, who played Jed Bartlet's secretary, Mrs Landringham, in The West Wing, and, more famously, but less within my sphere of attention, Mrs. McCluskey in Desperate Housewives, is up at the Guardian's web site. You can link to it here. The one question I couldn't answer was whether her death in The West Wing was a reaction to her first bout with cancer, but certainly her recovery and later career, and the way in which she recapitulated her illness in the show itself, was exemplary. I had wanted to make more of it, and in fact at the end of the first paragraph, after saying her death became the centrepiece of the final episode of Desperate Housewives, I wrote the following: 'In this case, art
imitated life, as the character, like Joosten herself, died after a
battle with lung cancer.' But for some reason, it was edited from the published piece. At any rate, the story of her career was indeed remarkable, and she and Lily Tomlin in their own show would have been a hoot.